Latinx Stories of Care and Repair: Community-Engaged Bilingual Narrative Medicine

Rocío Pichon-Rivière
Spanish and Portuguese
UC Irvine

Narrative medicine is an interdisciplinary practice where health care professionals and patients alike tell stories about caregiving, illness, healing, and about living with disabilities. The field of narrative medicine has grown in the US and impacted the education of healthcare providers by offering a space for critical thinking and professional identity formation. Most importantly, this growth has fostered the production of public humanities in English for audiences that seek a human perspective on medical conditions that brings attention to health disparities and reimagines inclusive care work. While there are many books and journals of narrative medicine in English, there is little work available that is in Spanish or is addressing the experience of Latinx communities in the U.S. The goal of this working group is to foster the local production of Latinx narrative medicine across health professions, patient populations, and people with disabilities, by way of creating curricula and events around bilingual Spanish/English/Spanglish creative writing. Our aim is to conduct conversations with local Latinx authors to discuss and practice a bilingual critical pedagogy of writing, and to train our students as facilitators to foster the production and dissemination of further Latinx health narratives in local communities.